Mary Talusan (Lacanlale) was awarded a PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles in Ethnomusicology. She was a teaching assistant in the Ethnomusicology Dept., History Dept., and Center for Southeast Asian Studies before designing and teaching the course Music Around the World. Her 2005 dissertation examines the diverse musics of the Magindanao, a Muslim Filipino minority group, in the context of their migration from rural Mindanao to Metro Manila, interaction with mainstream Filipino society, the Philippine government and cultural performances of national identity, and with Muslim cultures of the Middle East and Indonesia. In her M.A. thesis (1999), she explores how Muslim Filipino gong music called kulintang plays an important role in the cultural identity-seeking activities of Filipino Americans. Both these works treat issues of nationalism, ethnonationalism, postcolonialism, and transnationalism.

Dr. Talusan’s book project for the Mellon postdoctoral fellowship (2007-2009) is entitled Women’s Courtship Voices: Music and Gender in the Muslim Philippines. Based on new field research, this book explores how music and performance give voice to otherwise hidden sentiments of women during courtship.

Mary Talusan was a Fulbright (IIE) Scholar to the Philippines, Ford Fellow, and a Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellow, and most recently a Mellon Postdoctoral Associate at Tufts University. Currently she teaches at Loyola Marymount University and CSU Dominguez Hills.  She occasionally gives workshops on the kulintang ensemble, and has studied cello, Chinese erhu, Balinese gamelan, and Javanese gamelan. Several of her compositions have been performed in Boston, New Orleans, Baltimore, Los Angeles, and Manila.

Her next book project is entitled Marching to “Progress”: Music and Race in the Philippine Military Band during American Colonial Rule, 1898-1946. The book is based on a previously published article in Philippine Studies (2004).